Remember, we're talking about different OS's here; not Alpha Linux, which
just inherited the higher clock rate. At the time of the MIPS port,
Linux wasn't even yet a gleam in Linus' eye, for example.
Also, you may very well NOT be idle; it is feel under load, not interactive
feel on an unloaded system.
I think the real reasoning was:
1) didn't take enough CPU time to be measurable
2) had a number of advantages (per previous discussion; better
profiling and performance data, better network performance, possibly
better latencies on process wakeups, etc.)
3) for the operating systems of the day, it didn't seem to introduce
performance problems. If it did, they've long since been detected
and fixed.
4) we were scaling up CPU speeds by 10-100-1000 times; while things
seldom need to scale linearly, our intuition was that the clock
tick rate should scale up at least to some degree.
Again, this is history of 7 and 10 years ago. and some of the reasons
then may be moot now.
I think rehashing the history any more is futile; a more serious discussion
about whether there are any advantages for Linux to up its HZ rate for
the kernel would have merit.
- Jim
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/